261–270 of 1001 posts
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Also nuclear requires a powerful state to manage it safely, which has peace-related side effects.
Are you considering a world in which nuclear weapons do not exist at all? I don't know how you are going to disarm the current stable-state of mutually assured destruction.
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The devil is in the details. The easy part is now done, and further significant increases in solar/wind in Germany are not going to happen. Renewables now dominate generation during the optimal periods, but there's nothing on the horizon for other times. Your graph also ignores energy used for heating and for industrial processes. Their electrification is now stalled by high energy prices.
> not going to happen … nothing on the horizon for other times Batteries and storage. > heating and for industrial That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
Nearly useless for Germany. Some intraday storage will be helpful, but it will not strongly affect the wintertime fossil fuel consumption and the overall CO2 emissions.
> That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
No. It's not moving goalposts. Switching from gas to electric heat pumps for heating is absolutely relevant here. It's now inhibited by the high _electricity_ prices ( https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-transition-cle... ). Ditto for the ICE to EV transition.
The German government is now directly planning to pay around $20B in direct subsidies ( https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-pushes-17-billi... ) to build _gas_ power plants to alleviate some of that. I expect the final bill will be around $50B just for the new natural gas generation.
Germany is also quietly reassuring investors that it's safe to build natural gas by extending the subsidies: https://www.energyconnects.com/news/renewables/2025/january/...
As usual, actions speak louder than words.
If you're willing, we can place long-term bets on that. I'd be delighted to lose, but I don't expect it.
Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
AI is useful but nit as useful as the AI companied claim it to be and the ROI isn’t as great neither.
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I doubt it was for any particular energy policy objective, if they were Soviet funded. The soviets (or whatever name you want to give them now) are masters of finding fracture points in relatively stable western societies and exploiting them to make unstable western societies that are less effective at combating Soviet policy. See: almost the entirety of the modern political discourse.
given how the united states starved them of foreign currency and then introduced economic shock therapy that reduced life expectancy of the population by 10 yrs particularly for men one might say the western imperialists were better at that
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There's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.
Geothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes.
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It’s always funny to me to see folks with the “HN leans _________” comments every few days with the blank spot filled in with every single political position one can think of.
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It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.
Which regulations? What would change in the construction process? China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different? I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money." It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plan…
I don't know about big construction projects, but the costs to get an extension approved on my house is a drop in the ocean compared to paying tradies. (contractors in us speak.)
We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the pric…
A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc Part of that is because they are so…
https://www.ans.org/news/2025-02-05/article-6744/new-swedish...
We’ll see how it goes.
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What do you mean? Modern in situ uranium mining is one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have. It's not perfectly clean, but it's pretty darn good.
>What do you mean? I mean it's not clean >one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have Not the point. It's not clean, it shouldn't be called clean end of the story.
So if nuclear isn't clean, renewables are downright filthy.